Effigies (25 page)

It was getting dark, and Faye couldn’t decide if that was a good thing. If there was a bad guy prowling around in the woods—like, maybe Preston Silver—he’d have as much trouble seeing her as she’d have seeing him. The flashlight in the bottom of her day pack gave her a comfortable feeling, but she didn’t haul it out and turn it on. Why call attention to herself? If it was so dark that the bad guy required a flashlight to find her, then she’d see him coming. She didn’t intend to return the favor by turning on her own flashlight and showing him where she was.

Oka Hofobi and Joe were utterly still. How many times had she seen Joe go inside himself in this way? Was it because he was a hunter? Because he was a seamless part of nature? Was it a gift of his Native American heritage? Maybe. Oka Hofobi certainly exuded the same strong calm.

Faye herself was jittery, inside and out. She needed to fidget. She wanted to talk. She wasn’t cut out to be a hunter, nor prey.

She told herself to breathe, but not to make any noise doing it. This was harder than it sounded.

Joe had chosen the spot where they waited, on the edge of Calhoun’s open field. Sheltered by a copse of large trees, they could see anyone who might cross the field. The creek was at their right side. It didn’t offer absolute protection; it would be no big trick to lurk on the far side and shoot them. Still, no one could walk up and grab them from that direction, so it acted as a buffer in that small way.

Faye pressed her back to a tree that was wider than she was, resting the day pack on the ground between her feet. No one would be sneaking up behind her. Oka Hofobi and Joe did the same, pressing against the same tree so that the three of them faced outward in different directions. They were as prepared for an attack as they were likely to be, considering that none of them was armed. For the first time, she regretted urging Joe to stop carrying his primitive weapons around all the time. The fact that Joe was usually a walking arsenal had proven useful in the past. But not tonight.

Faye had emptied her pack, looking for weapons. They were brandishing the pitiful results. Oka Hofobi was holding her other flashlight like a drawn sword. Faye clutched the trowel in the same position. Joe would have snorted when she offered him the last bottle of water, but he was too much of a woodsman to make that much noise. He had emptied the bottle and set to work fashioning something sharp out of the empty plastic.

They waited, and the light began to fade.

Chapter Twenty-five

The footsteps didn’t come from the direction Faye expected. The sighing sound of grass on shoe leather came from straight ahead. Neely’s gunman had been on the far side of the Calhoun house, which would have been to her left. Maybe this was the sound of the sheriff coming to their rescue. If so, Neely would call out any minute, so that they’d know a friend was approaching.

Thirty seconds passed. A minute. Still no voice calling, “Faye, it’s me. You can come out now.” There was no sound but footsteps.

Joe and Oka Hofobi stood so close at her sides that she could feel their forearm muscles tighten as each of them slowly clenched his fists. They were armed with nothing but fists against a gun, and that gun was in the hand of someone who had recently pointed it at a sheriff and pulled the trigger.

When Neely’s voice finally sounded, Faye felt Joe’s shoulders sag with relief.

“Faye? Are you out here, Faye?”

Joe was leaning forward, ready to step out and call to Neely, when Faye realized that he was seconds from suicide. Taking advantage of the fact that he was off-balance and in mid-stride, she put her shoulder into his rib cage and shoved him over the tall bank and into the creek. Oka Hofobi, showing that he trusted Faye even when he didn’t know what was going on, jumped after him.

Faye knew that to look back was to waste time, but curiosity was her defining quality. She went over the bluff backside first, and not just to avoid breaking her neck in the shallow creek. She wanted a look at the sheriff’s face. Something inside her would know whether her instincts were true, if she could only see Neely’s face.

Sometimes the subconscious has to be jostled into awareness. Faye’s subconscious had stubbornly held onto a key piece of information, only letting it go now, at the last minute. Listening to the anonymous footfalls make their slow way through the thick woods, Faye had wondered at their pursuer’s ability to maneuver while the darkness only grew thicker. And when the sheriff had finally spoken, Faye had wondered why Neely waited so long to call her name.

The first question was easy to answer. Neely’s father had owned much of this land during her lifetime. She would have run free in its woods, and she would have almost lived in its creek. Of course she knew her way.

This answer pointed to the solution to her other question. And it solved a murder and two attempted murders, as well. If her family owned land around the cemetery mound when Lawrence Judd was taken there and beaten, then Preston Silver wasn’t the most likely suspect. Neely’s father was. He had associated with Silver, a known Klansman, all his life. There was precious little left of his mind, yet he retained enough of his memory to refuse to let his daughter take his business anywhere but to a Klansman. He was as likely as anyone to have attacked a young black man in 1965.

Would Neely Rutland have killed to protect her father’s good name? Faye remembered her devoted care of the old man. Yes, Faye thought she might. What was more, she thought Neely might have had more intimate reasons. Shame is an odd emotion, a primitive one. Faye suspected that Neely would do anything to keep people from knowing what her father, her own flesh and blood, had done. She would be desperate to avoid admitting to anyone, even herself, what the man she worshipped really was.

And this gave her the answer to the second question: Why had Neely waited so long to call out to Faye? She had waited because she needed to have a sure shot.

Faye had told her outright that she knew Lawrence Judd’s medicine had been tainted, and she’d told her that she thought Carroll Calhoun was killed because he knew too much about Judd’s attack. She’d been right on both counts. Her methodical approach to the puzzle of Calhoun’s killer had borne fruit, but she’d used the knowledge to settle on the wrong man. Neely knew that Faye would eventually sift through the rest of the evidence and come to the right answer. And now, this minute, she had.

Neely had crept up to them slowly, inexorably, because she couldn’t afford to miss.

As Faye tumbled backward, the last light of day glowed red on the muzzle of the sheriff’s gun. She could tell by the recoil of Neely’s arm that the handgun had been fired. The noise was instantaneous and deafening. A flutter of wind passed her face, and then she was falling. Perhaps that flutter was simply the wind. Or perhaps it was air being shoved aside by the bullet that barely missed Faye’s face before smashing into a tree.

In daylight, they would have had no hope. They were not swimming in a mighty river at the base of a yawning canyon. They were staggering through a creek that was chest-deep at best, between banks that were eight feet high, at most. In places, the land’s rolling topography brought those banks so low that Neely would be able to step down into the water with them, gun in hand. Though why would she want to do that when she could just stand on a bluff and shoot them, like fish in a barrel?

In daylight, there would have been no place to hide. The creek water was stained with tannins from pine needles and oak leaves. It looked like strong tea, dark brown but clear. If there had been any light at all, the water wouldn’t have hidden them. In the dark, they had a fighting chance.

Faye struck the water an arm’s-length away from Oka Hofobi and went straight to the bottom. She hit the creek bed so hard that she nearly gasped a couple of lungs full of water, but her survival instincts held. She waited until her face broke the surface and dragged in a full dose of oxygen, but she did it too loudly. A gunshot said that Neely had heard her.

In front of her, Oka Hofobi’s back was visible at the surface of the water, like a breaching whale. Joe had assumed the same position, so Faye followed suit. She found that the men were onto something. If she let herself float in shallow water, she could push herself along by scrabbling at the creek bottom with her hands. If she accidentally ventured into deeper water, her knees or feet could serve the same function. Careful motions ensured that no splashing sounds gave away their location. A slight turn of her head brought her face out of the water long enough to take a sip of air.

Joe was leading them toward Neely’s side of the creek. It was counter-intuitive, but this was the safest place to be. To see them, she’d have to stand right on the edge of the bank and look down into a ditch that was now black-dark. Faye remembered the spots where the bank was eroded at the base, leaving sizeable overhangs. She fervently hoped one of them would collapse under Neely’s feet. If it did, maybe the gun would drop out of her hand as she fell. That was a pleasant fantasy, and Faye indulged herself in it while she clawed her way through the chilly water.

One of them must have made a noise, or maybe a stray bit of starlight lit a wet body, but another gunshot sounded. Faye wondered whether Neely might run out of bullets, then lost another chunk of her faint hopes. A trained law enforcement officer would not set out to kill someone unless she had adequate ammunition. Even if the creek bank obeyed Faye’s wishes and collapsed beneath the sheriff’s feet, she would have the training and the survival skills to ride it down and maintain control of her weapon.

This was no ordinary killer stalking them.

In the quiet blackness, Faye understood how a person could believe in a spectre who stalked the woods by starlight. The notion of a Devil who would imprison a lonely girl in a cave seemed real, more real than anything that happened while the sun shone. If an unnaturally white arm were to reach up and drag her into a cold deep pool, Faye would have been terrified, but not surprised. At that moment, she knew why people passed their stories down to their children. People tell tales because they make sense of the unexplainable.

People tell tales because they are true.

Faye shoved herself a few more feet forward, working to keep up with Oka Hofobi and Joe. She let herself harbor another hope, because hope made her arms and legs work better. It was a plausible hope: Maybe someone had heard the shots. There had been three gunshots now. If someone heard them, surely they would investigate.

She mentally searched around for someone to hear those shots and act, but came up short. If Neely could be believed, Mrs. Calhoun wasn’t home. She’d also said that the Nail house was empty, and that Chuck had locked up the work trailer. Nobody else was in earshot, except maybe Neely’s father, and he wouldn’t be riding to their rescue. He couldn’t even feed himself any more.

Their only hope was that a car would pass just as Neely squeezed the trigger. Even then, what would a concerned driver do if they heard shots deep in the woods? They would call 911, who would call…the sheriff. If Neely handled her dispatcher well, she’d be sent out to investigate her own crime. Again. Faye imagined that Neely would be very good at feigning regret for the loss of three more lives.

Once, a long time ago, Carroll Calhoun had saved Lawrence Judd’s life, not so very far from here. Unless Faye missed her guess, there was no one to do her, Joe, and Oka Hofobi that same favor. They were on their own.

Her hope, and a lot of her strength, seeped out of her body and into the chilly creek water.

Faye should have expected that Joe would know where he was going. She’d been following him blindly because, frankly, she couldn’t see. It had been disconcerting to realize that he was leading them away from civilization, deeper into uncharted territory.

There was no moon to light their way. Faye knew that it would rise later, but it would be too late. There may have been stars, but Faye couldn’t twist her head enough to look up, not without a significant risk of getting that head shot off. Falling off the bank and hitting the water had been disorienting, but Faye still possessed enough of her mind to recognize which direction the creek was flowing. They were moving away from the road, and away from any hope of being found. Was this because Joe had a plan? Or was it because Joe always felt safer in the wilderness, away from people?

Faye rather liked people, when they behaved themselves and respected her privacy, but she’d love to be rid of one particular person. Neely moved quietly through the vegetation above them, only occasionally giving her position away with the sound of a breaking twig. It made Faye’s heart freeze just to know that she was up there.

When Joe took a quick right turn, Oka Hofobi followed, and so did Faye. If she hadn’t had her face in the water, she would have laughed out loud. Joe had led them to the old cave where Mr. Judd had hidden from his attacker. From Neely Rutland’s very own father. It burrowed deep into the ground under Neely’s feet. She’d never see it unless she got down into the creek. Even then, she would miss it in the darkness, unless she got incredibly lucky with her flashlight beam. With any luck, she’d be a hundred yards down the creek before she even realized that they weren’t in the water below her.

The opening was partially flooded, since water levels were significantly higher this summer than they’d been in Mr. Judd’s youth, but the cave still offered a safe haven. Faye leaned happily against a wall that felt like hard clay, and she let a delayed adrenaline rush leave her trembling and breathless.

She wished she could hear the quiet footsteps and breaking twigs that still marked Neely’s passage, but the cave’s walls insulated all sound. Oh, surely, she hadn’t seen them duck into this refuge. She grabbed at Joe, found his elbow in the dark, and squeezed it in gratitude. This might just work.